Monday, October 10, 2016

Syria Fact Sheet: Victory to the Revolution!

Rebel fighters hold their weapons as they take their positions near the
town of Kafr Nabuda in Hama province, Syria, Oct. 11, 2015. The Syrian
army, backed by allied militias, has made advances in western Syria
after heavy Russian airstrikes. (photo by REUTERS/Ammar Abdullah)

1)U.S. sheds crocodile tears over Aleppo while
their own coalition is waging attacks on people across the region; the
tears are for the deal they had with Russia. The U.S. never had a problem with
Assad while they were employing his torture chambers against captured Afghanis
and Iraqis during the Iraq war or while he kept Palestine in check.
Indeed the U.S. refusal to arm the opposition with heavy artillery,
anti-tank, anti-aircraft MANPADS and SAMS has long indicated the two-faced
non-commitment to any revolutionary upsurge of the masses for democracy.
The U.S. has always been hedging its bets in search of the new pawn or in
deference to Assad. The Obama “red line” declaration after Assad’s Sarin gas
attack on Ghouta proved this. That pro-Assad figures in the west have had so
much fun disputing the truth of the attack is due to the Obama administration’s
refusal to energize their press control, exactly for doublethink reasons when
they found no support in Congress for enforcing any red line.

2)The Arab national revolution emerged again in
2011 with the democratic and economic demands of the masses across the Middle
East and North Africa. The people's demands could not be met under
regimes that sustained imperialist control and perpetual semi-colonial
subjugation. Thus the masses came in collision with imperialism.
Both the dominant western imperialism and the emergent Russia/China bloc
contesting for geopolitical advantage and control of semi-colonial resources
and markets.

3)The counterrevolution emerged from multiple
quarters against the masses in the region from Egypt to Libya to Syria. The
majority of local counterrevolutionary forces are proxies for imperialists,
East or West. Thus we see Hezbollah backing Assad, while additional
counterrevolutionaries are the proxies for regional players and are external
expressions of intra-royalty factions in Saudi-Arabia and/or counters to
Iranian intervention, and a virtual invasion by Iran with Russian technical and
logistical support. To survive the masses have had to find arms where they can.
This disturbs sectarians who equate the stencils on the arms crates with
imperialist control over the end users. Some of these sectarians say there is
no Syrian working class.

4)The bourgeois army officers and Syrian capitalist
renegades around the FSA/SNC who abandoned Assad and ran off to Geneva to make
alliance with imperialism claim leadership of the opposition and make alliance
with western imperialism in the hope of gaining control in a post Assad regime
subordinate to the U.S./EU and free from the Russian bloc. They do not speak
for the revolution, nor for the Local Coordinating Committees (LCC).

5)Russia is not anti-imperialist;
Russia is looking at Syria as a fertile territory for investment of its surplus
capital.

6)The bombing of civilian populations by Assad and
Russia with no real opposition from the west is aimed not at ISIS or Al Qaeda
but at the civilians who are organizing their own self-defense, including their
own self administration.

7)The Local Coordinating Committees (LCC)
established across Syria are the form that self-organization takes, they are
the natural organs of self-defense and survival created by a civilian
population under siege. Inside the LCC’s both the democratic aspirations
of the masses and the need for civil administration and defense from the
neo-liberal barrel bombs of Assad unite a civilian opposition against all
anti-democratic forces. Thus they are an embryo of workers councils for self-administration
of the society by the working population and the lower middle class and
dispossessed farmers driven to the cities by climate change.

8)U.S., Russia and China suffer overproduction of
Capital and are desperate to find places to put it to use where they can assume
profit in actual investment and not speculation. Syria has the misfortune of
geographic location to be right where profitable pipelines can be built.
For Russia, Syria is a host that offers naval and airbases on the Mediterranean, a
geopolitical objective of the first order as a counter to the U.S. bases that
ring this body from Morocco to Turkey. This is also a proxy war over the
allegiance of important business partners for both imperialist blocs, namely
the business of Turkey and Iran. For Turkish and Iranian business, the
Russian bloc, just like the U.S. bloc would sacrifice the national
liberation of the Kurdish people just as readily as sending their bombers or facilitating
invasions of Syria.

9)But make no mistake, none of these profit-making
objectives can be achieved by either bloc so long as the revolution is contesting
political power with the regime; both Russia and the U.S. endeavor to crush the
Revolution; Russia seeks to obliterate it and fortify the personal regime of
Bashar Assad; the U.S. seeks to combine elimination of the revolutionaries with
co-optation of forces it can make amenable to the survival of an Assad regime
minus Assad.

10)The revolution increasingly comes to understand
that national liberation from the combination of the Assad dictatorship and the
invaders allied to Assad requires breaking with imperialism completely. This
places socialism on the order of the day as the only way out and that the
national democratic revolution has no hope of realization in a bourgeois
parliament but must be carried through to victory by the armed masses and their
own workers-democratic organizations. Stalinophiles count as nothing the
proliferation of hundreds of Local Coordinating Committees or their five years
of experience administering and exercising growing powers in areas liberated
from Assad.

11)Defense of Rojava against ISIS was at first
heroic and led by the Kurdish YPG (People’s Protection Units) with armed
women’s detachments taking the fight against brutal counterrevolutionary theocracy.
But as has happened numerous times in the post-WWII era, Kurdish national
liberation has collapsed into an unholy alliance with U.S. imperialism. That
this time, the betrayal was managed by the Maoist PKK (Kurdish Workers Party),
the same group that lately abandoned the armed struggle within Turkey, shows
how the stagist theory of Stalinism, in practice, abandons the masses when a
revolutionary victory is within their reach. The U.S. forced the YPG to abandon
the fight against Assad, just as it co-opted FSA forces on the southern front

12)Co-opted forces allied to one or the other bloc
can only deliver a carved up Syria corresponding to contemporary spheres of
economic interests. Assad howls that this is what Washington wants, but has
nothing to say about the forced redistribution of populations-- actual ethnic
cleansing -- that is the object of the Russian air campaign against Aleppo and
the invasion by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps.

13)Since the end of WWII the semi-colonial states
have been driven by the need of their peoples to liberate their economies from
the parasitism of imperialism. The Russia/China bloc is not leading an
anti-imperialist bloc that can win national independence for semi colonies from
imperialism. Russia and China are not leading an
anti-imperialist united front a la
the World Social Forum’s dream of a “21st century Socialism,” rather they are
trying to wrest countries from U.S./EU imperialist control across the global
south and claim the semi-colonial prizes for their own profit. Did their
BRICS bank bail out their preferred popular front in Brazil and head off the
U.S.-inspired impeachment? No!

14)Today internationalist workers must defend the
Syrian Revolution as it is the front line in the struggle of the international
proletariat and oppressed masses against the designs of imperialism, the system
that each of the two blocs employs in a quest for control of all the world’s
trade and labor. This is what is at stake in besieged Aleppo. Take the side
of the masses against every one of their would-be masters! Victory to the Syrian
Revolution!

Translate

Search This Blog

red rave is the loud mouth of members of the Communist Workers' Group of Aotearoa/New Zealand, committed to building a new communist international to lead workers to the revolutionary overthrow of global capitalism. Since 2010 we have been in a Liaison Committee with the Communist Workers' Group (USA), the Revolutionary Workers' Group (Zimbabwe) and the Revolutionary Workers' Group (Brazil).